This insight article uses data from Hitwise to illustrate trends and developments around the share of traffic to online retail sites this year over the Black Friday and Christmas trading period – and analyses what these trends tell us.

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The first IMRG conference of 2019 looking at the challenges and opportunities faced by fashion retailers, the future of the high street, the growing pressure of cross-border sales and how customer data links it all together.

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Online retail parcel delivery order volumes were up +6.4% year-on-year (YoY) in September, according to the latest data from the IMRG MetaPack UK Delivery Index. This is the lowest YoY rate in 2018 so far and, although order volumes typically decline month-on-month (MoM) around this time of year, the rate of decline has been a bit sharper for the past two months than last year; between July and August it was -7.5% (in 2017 it was -3.4%) and between August and September it was -15.1% (in 2017 it was -12%).

Today is 1 November and in retail that means only one thing – the Black Friday discounting event is imminent. Just exactly how imminent is a complicated question, which this article addresses and provides IMRG’s forecast for UK online retail sales over the period.